When Kevin Rudd quit as foreign minister on Wednesday he described Labor's leadership crisis as a soap opera and a saga.

He implied it was irrelevant to people's lives insofar as it was distracting from the real business of government - economic management and job creation - and was undermining business confidence.

Rudd was in Washington but across the other side of the world, in Victoria, the veteran political pollster John Scales nodded in furious agreement. Scales, who in more than a decade has conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of focus group sessions for governments, political parties and corporate clients, had already written down in front him ''soap opera'', ''irrelevant'' and ''boring''.

These were the three key conclusions of public opinion that he drew after conducting focus group sessions with soft voters in Melbourne just days before Rudd's announcement and after the leadership issue had been on the front pages most days.

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''I felt like I had been bugged,'' Scales said as he listened to Rudd.

Given Rudd's campaign was being run by the veteran ALP strategist Bruce Hawker, Scales suspected Rudd's lines may have been driven by a little focus group polling of his own.

Far more significantly, Scales says his latest research shows not only is the damage to Labor caused by this saga irreparable in the short to medium term but there are broader negative implications for politics in general.

Julia Gillard will win today's leadership ballot handsomely, with upwards of two-thirds of the caucus vote. Yesterday, she channelled John Howard's maxim of ''the things that unite us are stronger than those which divide us'' by predicting an outbreak of unity in the wake of the ballot.

Rudd says that he will withdraw gracefully in that he will not challenge Gillard a second time but will accept the result and stress the need for unity.

This, of course, does not prevent Rudd re-emerging again closer to the election if the polls continue to flatline and the survival instinct of MPs supplants loyalty.

Rudd always needed nature to take its course and the reason he will be stomped today is that the majority of caucus feel that has not been allowed to happen. The Gillard forces, who have done more than the other side to precipitate today's ballot, have caught Rudd short.

Rudd has played his part as well in bringing events to a head and would be well-served to take a leaf out of Malcolm Turnbull's book about being loyal to the party and the leader while hoping one day another chance may come.

Scales says that regardless of what happens between now and the election, he cannot envisage the Labor Party winning.

From a qualitative aspect, his research puts federal Labor in deeper trouble than Kristina Keneally's outfit before last year's NSW state election. Scales conducted focus groups in western Sydney in the weeks before the state election, so he knows firsthand the feelings of voters then.

''They have had a gutful of them for a long time and now it's reached a tipping point,'' he says of the federal government.

When people tell him the government has become ''irrelevant'', it means they feel government has ''no bearing on their lives any more''.

There is ''a complete lack of governance'' as if ''no one is running the country any more''. Their perception is that members of the government are focused entirely on each other, not their jobs.

''We have to go to work every day and do our jobs. These people do not,'' was a common sentiment.

Scales conducted his research before the leadership really exploded and minister after minister engaged in personal attacks of unprecedented and astonishing candour.

Yet, already, the voters had come to perceive politics as being about little more than personal attack - and this is where the sentiment extends beyond Labor to cover Tony Abbott and even Bob Brown, who dedicates a lot of his public comment to attacking Abbott.

''They are switching off to all of it,'' Scales says of the personal attacks.

It has been a good tactic because it has destroyed the government and put the Coalition in an election-winning position but that does not mean the people like it, he says.

''There is a huge leadership vacuum out there,'' he says.

Because his research was conducted in Melbourne, people used an AFL analogy to describe Abbott.

They called him a ''tagger'' which, for those unfamiliar with the game, is a tough player assigned to stick to a star player on the other side and prevent them playing their game by haranguing and frustrating them constantly.

This helps explain why the Coalition is so strong in the polls but Abbott's personal ratings hover around the same levels as Gillard's. Still, Abbott wouldn't be Gillard for quids.

Phillip Coorey is the Sydney Morning Herald's chief political correspondent.